My thoughts as NUJ members in Bristol read out the names of more than 200 media workers assassinated by the so-called Israeli Defence Force, at a vigil in the city cente.
What can I say? It is hard to contain the anger and the despair that I feel every day as I follow the news from Gaza and the West Bank. The systematic killing of journalists and their families is just another atrocity on top of those meted out daily by the Israeli Defence Force on Palestinian families.
And we only know about what is happening there because our fellow journalists insist on doing their job, whatever the cost.
Almost a quarter of a century ago I was in Ukraine working with the journalists’ union there. They were still reeling from the assassination of Georgi Gongadze in the year 2000. An independent journalist exposing high level corruption he was murdered in Kiyv at the behest of the then President Kuchma.
In 2001 there was understandable outrage here when NUJ member Martin O’Hagan was assassinated in the north of Ireland. huis killers have only recently been brought to trial.
And in 2018 the world was shocked by the brutal and blatant assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey as he visited a Saudi consulate. Yet only a year later our colleague Lyra McKee was murdered in Derry, while covering a story in 2019.
In so many countries where I have worked journalism is conducted under a requirement to comply with state security considerations rather than in the public interest. In Egypt it is exceedingly dangerous to step out of line and Sisi’s prisons are full of those who do. In Philippines, those journalists who are not in the pockets of corrupt politicians are continually in danger when they report about crime and corruption. Meanwhile all the independent journalists I have worked with in Belarus are now either in jail or in exile.
To my shame I have lost contact with the community journalists from Ramallah in the West Bank that I worked with around the same time. Even then they were trying to wake up the world to the oppression they experienced at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces, evidently to little avail.
Like the emergency services, journalists will tend to run towards the gunfire rather than away from it. In part that explains why many of our colleagues have fallen in war zones, and too often from so-called ‘friendly fire’. But what is happening in Gaza is in a different order of danger, of evil. The message coming from Netanyahu and his fascist Cabinet members has been quite clear – ‘Kill the messengers so they cannot expose the full extent of the horrors we are inflicting on the inhabitants of Gaza.’
But what makes it worse is that their families are considered fair game too – like the health workers and the charity workers, and their families too. If this is not genocide, it certainly feels like it to me.
I don’t think enough has been done by some of our colleagues in the mainstream media to properly explain what is going on. The people of Gaza are trapped, literally fenced in; they and their schools, hospitals, universities, markets and places of worship are sitting ducks. For the IDF it is like shooting fish in a barrel. How the living have not gone mad is a tribute to their bravery and resilience – but they have had 70 years of bitter experience to draw upon.
How our colleagues have continued to work and tell the world what they are witnesses too is a marvel, and humbling to the rest of us. If by some miracle independent journalists were allowed to enter Gaza, how many of us would have the guts to go?
Being a journalist is a privilege and a mission. I have always insisted that press freedom is a responsibility exercised by journalists on behalf of the public. We do well to remember that we are supposed to be the eyes and ears and voices of the audiences we serve. Such freedom is unknown to those functioning in the middle east.
We have to be grateful for the freedoms we enjoy, but our freedoms have to be defended from any attempt to limit our options. We defend them by calling out the shortcoming of those who govern us, and even those of our colleagues in the mainstream media who fail to tell the whole truth.
Most important of all we defend press freedom by honouring and campaigning for colleagues who have lost their lives for simply doing their job.
Pic credit: Lise Bosher
